We went at once to the vestry. I took down the volume, and laid it before him. He opened it, with a curious look at me first. But the moment he lifted the cover, its condition at once attracted and as instantly riveted his attention. He gave me one glance more, in which questions and remarks and exclamations numberless lay in embryo; then turning to the book, was presently absorbed, first in reading the genuine entry, next in comparing it with the forged one. ‘Right, after all!’ he exclaimed at length. ‘In what?’ I asked.’ In dropping me without a word, as if I had been an impostor? In forgetting that you yourself had raised in me the hopes whose discomfiture you took as a personal injury?’ ‘My dear sir!’ he stammered in an expostulatory tone, ‘you must make allowance. It was a tremendous disappointment to me.’ ‘I cannot say I felt it quite so much myself, but at least you owed me an apology for having misled me.’ ‘I had _not_ misled you,’ he retorted angrily, pointing to the register.--‘There!’ ‘You left _me_ to find that out, though. _You_ took no further pains in the matter.’ ‘How _did_ you find it out?’ he asked, clutching at a change in the tone of the conversation. I said nothing of my dream, but I told him everything else concerning the discovery. When I had finished-- ‘It’s all plain sailing now,’ he cried. ‘There is not an obstacle in the way. I will set the thing in motion the instant I get home.--It will be a victory worth achieving,’ he added, rubbing his hands. ‘Mr Coningham, I have not the slightest intention of moving in the matter,’ I said. His face fell. ‘You do not mean--when you hold them in your very hands--to throw away every advantage of birth and fortune, and be a nobody in the world?’ ‘Infinite advantages of the kind you mean, Mr Coningham, could make me not one whit more than I am; they _might_ make me less.’ ‘Come, come,’ he expostulated; ‘you must not allow disappointment to upset your judgment of things.’ ‘My judgment of things lies deeper than any disappointment I have yet had,’ I replied. ‘My uncle’s teaching has at last begun to bear fruit in me.’ ‘Your uncle was a fool!’ he exclaimed. ‘But for my uncle’s sake, I would knock you down for daring to couple such a word with _him_.’ He turned on me with a sneer. His eyes had receded in his head, and in his rage he grinned. The old ape-face, which had lurked in my memory ever since the time I first saw him, came out so plainly that I started: the child had read his face aright! the following judgment of the man had been wrong! the child’s fear had not imprinted a false eidolon upon the growing brain. ‘What right had, you,’ he said, ‘to bring me all this way for such tomfoolery?’ ‘I told you it would not further your wishes.--But who brought me here for nothing first?’ I added, most foolishly. ‘I was myself deceived. I did not intend to deceive you.’